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ОглавлениеThe Nuts and Bolts of Getting Started
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.
— TONY ROBBINS
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
— OSCAR WILDE
If you are still reading this book, the rest of my job is going to be easy. Once the “why” becomes clear, explaining what to do is straightforward.
One of the best urological surgeons in the country once told me, “I don’t do anything special, I just cut and stitch all day — the magic of healing is in the body itself.”
In fact, it takes a lot of effort to overwhelm the healing system of the body. Still, we’ve found the perfect recipe for disaster in our modern disease-promoting lifestyle of caloric excess, which originated with toxic substances mislabeled as food and has been coupled with unmanaged stress and a lack of physical activity and sleep.
When you put the right fuel in your body, health and healing happen almost automatically. You are “designed” to move naturally. You do not need to do anything drastic. My program simply asks you to eat, move, and live in the unique way that you are designed to do. Everything else will take care of itself because the wisdom of healing is within.
The reason you need to get started right now is that the sooner you follow the right path, the easier it will be to heal. The further you go the wrong way, the greater the effort required to correct course.
Eating for health — rather than eating for entertainment — should be a conscious commitment.
Taking responsibility and affirming our control and autonomy, which is what we do when we consciously decide to nurture and nourish ourselves, are as applicable here as in other aspects of our life.
When we have been addicted to an unhealthy lifestyle, it takes time and effort to break the addiction. In fact, it can take up to forty-five days to take an idea from cognition (understanding) to emotional buy-in and finally to actual behavior change.1
The goal is to live in sync with our natural rhythms in an effortless way. This can happen as we move to convert our surroundings and routine so that healthy habits become our default. Think about a child learning to tie his or her shoelaces: The process goes from not knowing how to do it, to learning the steps, to practicing the steps, to finally being able to do it reflexively, without even thinking about it.
And here is the good news: The rewards — of more energy, vitality, and zest for life — are almost immediate. Although a complete transformation takes months, within a week or two, the taste buds start to adjust and the body starts to respond in such a way that you will not want to regress to previous unhealthy habits. The compliments you will get from friends, family, and coworkers will be a bonus.
Establishing Test Baselines
As you begin your journey to turbocharge your metabolism, it is important to track your metabolic numbers from the beginning so that you have a basis for comparison on later tests.
The first tests to start with are a fasting lipid panel — which includes total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL (healthy) cholesterol, and LDL (bad) cholesterol — plus fasting blood glucose and HbA1c. The goal is to get total cholesterol around 150 mg/dL, triglycerides as close to 75 mg/dL as possible, HDL above 50 mg/dL, and LDL below 100 mg/dL (see table 3.1). Your fasting blood-glucose goal is to get under 75 mg/dL, and the HbA1c goal is under 5 percent (an ideal HbA1c is 4.8 percent). These tests are available and typically covered by most health-care insurance programs.
Table 3.1. Basic fasting lipid panel test with optimum levels
Remember, these numbers are indirect markers of how well you have hit the state of Turbo Metabolism, where your body has all the energy it needs to do everything you ask it to do! As a Turbo Metabolism champion, you will most likely enjoy life to the fullest with all the great experiences, learning opportunities, and adventures that you deserve to have!
Supplementary tests may also be important in achieving Turbo Metabolism, depending on your specific health situation: high-sensitivity CRP (or cardio CRP), liver enzyme (ALT), thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), and vitamin D. See table 3.2 for the ideal ranges for each, and consult with your physician about adding these baseline tests.
Table 3.2. Supplementary baseline tests
Preparing for Your Journey
Here are some tips to help you launch your journey to Turbo Metabolism. These actions prepare you mentally to succeed:
• Make a list of your personal goals by filling out the sheet “Ten Reasons Why I Want to Achieve Turbo Metabolism” in appendix 2.
• Announce your plan to several friends and family members, which will help create personal and social accountability.
• Ask a friend or partner specifically to support and encourage you. Even better: Ask the person to embark on this journey with you.
• Take nude photographs of yourself, front and side pose. Use these for a visual comparison as you make progress toward your goal (but keep them in a secure place and away from social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!).
• If you are diabetic, commit to testing your blood sugar levels after fasting, before meals, and sixty minutes after each meal. This is the only way you can gauge your own unique response to different foods.
• Make a list of nonfood-related activities that bring you pleasure, such as music, movies, comedy, being outdoors, getting a massage, or getting a manicure or pedicure.
Next, here are the first five action steps to take. The first three are described more fully in the rest of this chapter:
1. Take out the trash.
2. Shop for health.
3. Hack your bad habits.
4. Start a daily food log, listing the foods you eat each day.
5. Start an exercise log, listing your physical activities each day (see chapter 6).
Taking Out the Trash
This crucial step requires going through your kitchen pantry, refrigerator, and snack drawers looking for items that feed disease. As you find them, throw them in the garbage bin. Here is a list of items that belong in the trash:
• White sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar substitutes (look for hidden sugars ending in “-ose” in ketchup, flavorings, and even bread)
• All boxed, packaged snacks and convenience foods (anything you’d call “junk food”)
• Candy in solid or liquid form; that is, soda and juice, including diet drinks
• White flour — white bread, pasta, cookies, cake, bagels, muffins, and desserts
• Dairy — milk, creamers, cheese, and butter
• Alcohol — including wine and beer
• White rice and white potatoes
• Processed meats (bacon, sausage, salami, and deli meat), red meat (such as feedlot beef), and pork
• Trans fats and processed industrial oils like soybean oil, palm oil, and canola oil, which is made from GMO rapeseeds
As I’ve said, white sugar, candy, soda, juice, and white flour are on the trash list because these foods spike glucose, which leads to chronic insulin elevation, and chronic insulin elevation is a direct contributor to insulin resistance.
Please keep in mind that not all carbs are the enemy. Neither are all fats. When we start thinking about food quality, the breakdown of protein, carbs, and fats and even the calorie counts become irrelevant. Real food has a profound energy effect on the body that has to be experienced. It cannot be quantified in these oversimplified ways.
Here are some further explanations of this list.
Why Are Sugar Substitutes So Bad?
First, all synthetic sugar substitutes are nutritionally bankrupt. Second, they create cravings for energy-dense foods because the sweet taste perception is associated with the appetite regulators in the brain anticipating new calories.2 The reward centers in our brain are strongly wired to seek out sugar as an energy source. Third, several commonly used sugar substitutes, such as saccharine and acesulfame, have been shown to produce cancer in animal studies.3 Aspartame, a common sugar substitute in diet soda, is metabolized to formaldehyde — a potent brain poison. Fourth, sugar substitutes have a harmful effect on the gut microbiome (healthy bacteria in the colon; see chapter 10). You have about a hundred trillion friendly gut bacteria to feed and “care for”: your inner garden. If you poison them, harmful bacteria can take over and control your food choices, increase cravings for the wrong foods, and increase the energy absorbed from food, thereby having a profound influence on health outcomes. Other than pure stevia leaf (an herbal product used as a sugar substitute for centuries in South America), on which the jury is still out, you should steer away from artificial sweeteners.
Why Is Dairy on the Trash List?
Cow’s milk has the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which promotes rapid growth and can cause you to gain weight quickly. IGF-1 has also been associated with cancer-cell growth.4 In addition, cow’s milk is loaded with cow antigens (proteins that activate the immune system, resulting in inflammation), which may not be compatible with the human body. In addition, a main ingredient of cow’s milk is lactose — a sugar that will definitely spike your blood glucose very quickly.
Modern dairy farm cows are typically kept pregnant year-round and milked twice a day. They are given artificial hormones to keep them in this condition and antibiotics to keep them from getting sick from their udders becoming infected.
The argument that drinking more milk provides calcium that will prevent osteoporosis is simply not valid. Osteoporosis is not a milk-deficiency condition. The United States has the highest incidence of osteoporosis in the civilized world, even though it has the highest consumption of milk and cheese. Cow’s milk and products derived from it spike insulin and cause inflammation, which of course is bad news.5
And by the way, milk or cheese is an excellent delivery mechanism for cholesterol. Homogenizing milk creates particles that are small enough to penetrate the lining of the blood vessels and cause damage.
Holstein cows, which form the basis of modern industrialized dairy farming, have much higher levels of harmful and addictive A1 beta-casein than Jersey or Guernsey cows, the previous (though less-productive) industrial “cow of choice.” We now know that A1 beta-casein strongly correlates with diabetes, as does the essential amino acid isoleucine found in milk.6
This is a good example of a food choice that causes hormonal imbalance as well as creating a toxic load.
Why Is Alcohol on the Trash List?
Alcohol is derived from carbohydrates that have been allowed to languish so that they start fermenting, as with beer and wine. A distilled spirit — also called a distilled liquor, including brandy, whiskey, rum, and vodka — is an alcoholic beverage that is obtained by distilling wine or some other previously fermented or brewed fruit, plant juice, or starch (such as various grains). Alcohol has almost twice the calorie content per gram of a carbohydrate. As alcohol cannot be excreted by the body, it must be metabolized by the liver. Whenever we ingest alcohol, the liver has to spend time away from fat burning to metabolize alcohol. The end products of alcohol metabolism stimulate the liver to produce more fatty acids and store them. In fact, you can induce a fatty liver with as little as three days of alcohol ingestion.
Even worse, some of the metabolites of alcohol are toxic for your hormonal balance. The bottom line is that alcohol is not a health food, and if you are trying to turbocharge your metabolism, alcohol does not belong on your menu at all. About 20 percent of Americans have a drinking problem. You cannot rationalize drinking for health reasons, not even red wine. In fact, most of the red wine produced in the United States is loaded with toxins like pesticides, mold toxins, and synthetic chemicals (to hasten the chemical reactions in order to maximize profits), as well as heavy metals and phthalates.7 Ladies, all alcohol (including wine) is a strong risk factor for breast cancer.
As for resveratrol, the “magic ingredient” of red wine that has antiaging and anti-inflammatory effects, you would have to drink about 111 glasses of wine every day to get enough resveratrol shown in animal studies to be beneficial!8
Why Is Red Meat on the Trash List?
Red meat contains heme iron, which is toxic to the pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin. Also, red meat (especially processed meat) contains nitrates, which reduce insulin secretion and impair glucose tolerance. To top that, environmental pollutants and toxicants are concentrated in the more fatty red meats.
Is All Fat Bad?
Saturated fat, especially from red meat, contributes to insulin resistance in several ways. Excessive consumption of saturated fat is believed to directly block the insulin receptors and the muscles, causing insulin resistance. It is also known to cause inflammation and oxidative stress. Unhealthy fats include margarine, commercial mayonnaise and salad dressings, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils, and fried foods.
Good sources of fat include raw nuts (almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, walnuts, pecans, pine nuts, and pistachios), seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, watermelon, flax, hemp, and chia), olives, coconuts, avocados, and wild-caught cold-water fish. These are healthier sources of fat, which can actually suppress appetite and promote Turbo Metabolism.
Don’t All Fatty Foods Have Cholesterol?
Actually, cholesterol is only produced by animals that have a liver. The human liver produces about 800 mg of cholesterol a day, enough to cover your body’s needs: to regenerate cell membranes, maintain brain function, and manufacture hormones. Most of the cholesterol in the body is recycled, so you actually do not need to take in any cholesterol at all. Cholesterol-rich foods include meat, eggs, and dairy, such as milk and cheese. If you eat more cholesterol-rich food, your liver tries to make less. If you eat less cholesterol-rich food, the liver makes more. Cholesterol is an important raw material that gets converted to vitamin D, steroid hormones (such as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and cortisol), and bile acids needed for digestion. Cholesterol is needed to construct the semipermeable membrane that surrounds the cells and to repair damaged endothelial cells, which line and protect the blood vessels. Cholesterol itself is not the culprit. The problem lies in an inability of the body to process cholesterol properly, or an inability of the body’s antioxidant system to guard against oxidation of cholesterol. This is why a nutrient-dense plant-rich diet is so important.
Facts and Fallacies
• Alcohol, even in low doses, can cause breast cancer and birth defects.9
Technically, any alcohol at all is poisonous, even from mouthwash!
• Wine is a health food because it has resveratrol.
At one time, resveratrol, an ingredient in many wine products, was suggested to act as a protective agent against the carcinogenic effects of ethanol. The assumption was based on animal studies, which have shown that resveratrol above certain thresholds may reduce the incidence of tumors in several of the alcohol-related cancer sites (colon, liver, and female breast). However, the protective and health-promoting aspects of wine/resveratrol are highly exaggerated and simply not true.10
• French fries are 47 percent fat, and donuts 50 percent fat.
Fried foods have a lot more “dirty” fat from unhealthy, processed oils than we can even imagine! These create chronic inflammation and increase risk for cancer.11
• Avocados have lots of cholesterol.
Avocados do not have a liver, so they do not have any cholesterol! As I say, livers produce cholesterol as an important component of cells and for hormone production. Most of the cholesterol in the body is recycled, so we do not need to consume it at all.
Shopping for Health
After taking out the trash, your next step is to shop for foods that will keep you healthy. What you include in your diet is almost as important as what you exclude. Always choose real food — unprocessed whole foods or items made with ingredients that your body recognizes. If you can focus on food quality, you will never need to worry about counting calories or even about carbohydrates, fats, or proteins. Instead of counting calories, make the food that you eat really count.
I often run into my patients at my local grocery store, Sprouts, and they are always curious to find out what I am buying. First, you should choose a grocery store where you can see all the different sections from the front of the store and one that features fresh produce, as opposed to store layouts that confuse shoppers with thousands of packaged, processed items labeled as food. Nowadays, many small grocery stores, like Sprouts and Trader Joe’s, as well as major supermarkets, such as Whole Foods, are introducing a wide array of organic produce — priced competitively — so it’s easier to make the right choice.
Here are shopping lists for healthy Turbo Metabolism foods. Keep in mind that the produce and bulk aisles of the grocery store are where the health-promoting magic happens. Generally, the middle aisles of the supermarket are filled with unhealthy processed food and junk snacks, typically packaged in colorful boxes and plastic bags, replete with mascots of tigers, cheetahs, and other animals. Stay away from the middle aisles as much as possible!
Seeds, Grains, and Beans to Buy in Bulk
Seeds, grains, and beans are loaded with micronutrients and have a long shelf life. It’s always a good idea to keep your pantry stocked with these superstars from the bulk section.
Please note that although many people substitute brown rice for white rice, brown rice can be contaminated with arsenic, so I recommend avoiding it.
Almonds, raw
Amaranth
Black beans
Black-eyed peas
Brazil nuts
Buckwheat
Chia seeds
Chickpeas (a.k.a. garbanzo beans)
Chocolate, dark (70 percent or higher cacao)
Cocoa powder
Flaxseeds
Kaniwa
Kidney beans
Lentils
Oat bran
Oats, steel-cut
Pinto beans
Pistachios
Pumpkin seeds
Quinoa
Sunflower seeds
Ten-bean mix for soup
Walnuts
Wild rice, black rice
Vegetables, Fruits, and Fresh Produce
Cruciferous vegetables are superfoods, loaded with antioxidants and cancer fighters; they are nature’s “powerhouse” and the closest thing we have to a real “magic pill.” See Chapter 10 for more on superfoods. As often as possible, buy organic produce, especially for the “dirty dozen,” or produce with the highest pesticide load (see chapter 9). Finally, there’s nothing wrong with buying bagged prewashed greens, which are ready-to-use salad mixes or can be used as part of a smoothie.
Apples
Artichokes
Asparagus
Avocado (excellent source of healthy fats, protein, and fiber)
Baby greens or bagged mixed greens
Bananas
Beets, golden or red
Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries
Celery
Coconut (good plant source of healthy fats)
Cruciferous vegetables: arugula, bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, horseradish, mustard greens, radish, red cabbage, Swiss chard, turnip greens, and watercress
Cucumbers
Garlic
Kale
Melons
Onions
Oranges
Peaches
Pears
Plums
Pomegranate
Shiitake mushrooms
Snap peas
Spinach
Summer squash
Sweet potatoes /yams
Tomatoes
Cooking Oils
